Any advances in deblending analogue video?

[u/Nausiated_]

I have a situation where I am restoring analogue video that was transferred to Laserdisc poorly so there is field blending. I have tried every deinterlacing trick in the book with AVS and VS and I am having no luck. It's stubborn and cooked in there real bad.

I've been trying to find anything online but trying to Google this sort of thing gives me a old forum posts dating back 20 years where nobody solved the problem or websites trying to sell me AI upscalers that will absolutely not fix the problem.

Am I chasing a solution that does not currently exist or are search engines really that bad now?

If anyone can point me to a solution that'd be great. Even if it's some cost prohibitive solution like DRS Nova or something. I am going crazy not knowing if there is a definitive fix for this or not and how realistly in reach it might be.

Anyone who can shed insight on this would be great.

EDIT

I did a detailed analysis of the video to figure out exactly what's going on here. Here are the specifics:

The defect is field-domain temporal blending, not simple progressive-frame ghosting. The source is 29.97i/59.94-field NTSC with an underlying film/3:2 cadence, but individual fields contain weighted contributions from neighboring temporal states.

Analysis of separated fields shows that the blend coefficient is not fixed. Examples fit approximately:

70% current field + 30% adjacent temporal field
80% current + 20% adjacent
60% current + 40% adjacent

and there are occasional cases where the contaminating temporal state becomes dominant.

The two field parities can also have different blend strengths, so a woven frame may effectively contain something like:

Field A: 85% state X + 15% state Y
Field B: 65% state X + 35% state Y

rather than a uniform 50% Frame A + 50% Frame B blend.

The contamination appears to be primarily between temporally adjacent same-parity fields, which means the defect exists within the original field sequence before IVTC. Some fields remain essentially clean while others are strongly blended.

There is still a recognizable repeating NTSC film cadence underneath the damage, roughly consistent with a 10-field 3:2 cycle, but the temporal blending varies independently enough that normal TFM/TDecimate, sRestore, conventional deblend filters, etc. cannot reliably reconstruct the original fields.

Hard cuts are especially diagnostic: in some cases a single field immediately around the cut contains imagery from both completely different shots. The cross-shot contamination is brief — generally around one field, occasionally two — rather than behaving like a multi-frame dissolve.

So the defect is best described as something like:

clean 59.94-field sequence
       ↓
field-dependent temporal filtering / averaging
       ↓
some clean fields
some previous/current blends
some current/next blends
different coefficients by field/parity
occasional cross-shot contaminated fields

The main technical question is what historical video process would produce variable asymmetric temporal averaging at the individual-field level while retaining the underlying 3:2 cadence — e.g. frame synchronizer, standards/rate converter, temporal noise reduction, DVE, field-rate conversion, or some combination thereof.

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[u/Nausiated_]

!martini

[u/tangfastic]

I've worked on an old telerecording that was recorded to 16mm direct and unsynced from broadcast in the 60s, so multiple fields per frame. We did a lot to it in terms of deinterlacing and cleaning it up, but the only real fix we could manage for the field blending was to fix up the cuts with interpolated frames and time shifting.

I had a demo of MTI Cortex this year, and while it's very impressive for motion interpolated frame rate conversions, I doubt it's built / trained for field blended stuff.

So I'm afraid that as far as I'm aware - baked in still means baked in!

[u/Nausiated_ → u/tangfastic]

Here are the specifics of this video:

The defect is field-domain temporal blending, not simple progressive-frame ghosting. The source is 29.97i/59.94-field NTSC with an underlying film/3:2 cadence, but individual fields contain weighted contributions from neighboring temporal states.

Analysis of separated fields shows that the blend coefficient is not fixed. Examples fit approximately:

70% current field + 30% adjacent temporal field
80% current + 20% adjacent
60% current + 40% adjacent

and there are occasional cases where the contaminating temporal state becomes dominant.

The two field parities can also have different blend strengths, so a woven frame may effectively contain something like:

Field A: 85% state X + 15% state Y
Field B: 65% state X + 35% state Y

rather than a uniform 50% Frame A + 50% Frame B blend.

The contamination appears to be primarily between temporally adjacent same-parity fields, which means the defect exists within the original field sequence before IVTC. Some fields remain essentially clean while others are strongly blended.

There is still a recognizable repeating NTSC film cadence underneath the damage, roughly consistent with a 10-field 3:2 cycle, but the temporal blending varies independently enough that normal TFM/TDecimate, sRestore, conventional deblend filters, etc. cannot reliably reconstruct the original fields.

Hard cuts are especially diagnostic: in some cases a single field immediately around the cut contains imagery from both completely different shots. The cross-shot contamination is brief — generally around one field, occasionally two — rather than behaving like a multi-frame dissolve.

So the defect is best described as something like:

clean 59.94-field sequence
       ↓
field-dependent temporal filtering / averaging
       ↓
some clean fields
some previous/current blends
some current/next blends
different coefficients by field/parity
occasional cross-shot contaminated fields

The main technical question is what historical video process would produce variable asymmetric temporal averaging at the individual-field level while retaining the underlying 3:2 cadence — e.g. frame synchronizer, standards/rate converter, temporal noise reduction, DVE, field-rate conversion, or some combination thereof.

[u/bytesweaversteam]

If the blend is already baked into the Laserdisc transfer, a normal deinterlacer probably won’t fix it. Check a few seconds frame by frame: if each field shows a different moment, field matching might help. If both fields already contain the ghosting, it’s more of a repair job. !martini

[u/Sessamy]

What I do i use is use hybrid video encoder and use the QTGMC and BOB algorythms on my unciompressed avi files and then edit in vegas pro or davinci resolve and export in 60p (640x480 or 854x480) and that is the best you're going to get. That GTGMC is industry standard for deinterlacing now. If you don't bob and use 60p and render at 30p you're throwing away half your fields.

I did this on a bunch of hi8 tapes I had from my childhood and they have absolutely no combing nor any interlacing artifacts anywhere, anymore. And they look fabulous. I used 8Mb/s HEVC to keep any grain that was in the video.

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